Apart from Prof. Ng's style and enthusiasm one of the things that makes specifically his ML class work is that he focuses a lot more on how to think about ML pr

Apart from Prof. Ng's style and enthusiasm one of the things that makes specifically his ML class work is that he focuses a lot more on how to think about ML problems rather than the details of solving them. I took the course without any CS background, but with some background in optimization techniques. And what i really took away was to model problems, how to optimize models, how to figure out if they are working at all, and most importantly the need to have different cross validation and test sets. The last one is something that can be used for any statistical algorithm but often missed by new engineers.